NeoLight is an abbreviation I've come up with for "NeoOffice Spotlight Importer". This importer allows [http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ Spotlight] to index metadata and content within the files created by NeoOffice. Through Spotlight integration, searching across multiple NeoOffice documents can be done in a nice, Mac-like fashion.

NeoLight is an abbreviation I've come up with for "NeoOffice Spotlight Importer". This importer allows [http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ Spotlight] to index metadata and content within the files created by NeoOffice. Through Spotlight integration, searching across multiple NeoOffice documents can be done in a nice, Mac-like fashion.

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Today is the first development release of the NeoLight plugin. This release aims to be the start of an addition that will be included with future builds of NeoOffice/J. The purposes of this release are:

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# Allow testers who have Tiger to begin assessing the utility of the plugin.

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# Allow developers access to the source code to bugfix and improve the plugin.

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# Research what other types of metadata may wish to be extracted from documents.

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# Get people excited enough to help add support for OpenDocument formatted documents.

==Licensing==

==Licensing==

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NeoLight is being released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. While I would have preferred to use a GPL-style license like the main NeoOffice project, LGPL is necessary in this case as the Spotlight importers are shared libraries loaded into closed-source applications. Using LGPL allows for the executable code of NeoLight to be used by Spotlight without "infecting" Mac OS X with GPL requirements.

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NeoLight is released under the GNU General Public License. It is our opinion that GPL does not extend to the operating system as GPL contains exceptions for code utilizing standard operating system services.

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==Installation Requirements==

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==Downloading==

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* Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

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The NeoLight plugin is included by default for all NeoOffice installers. NeoLight updates will be made available with the next NeoOffice patch following the release of a new version of NeoLight.

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* NeoOffice/J (or OpenOffice.org X11...see below)

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==Downloading==

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The NeoLight plugin is no longer available as a download separate from the NeoOffice application. Using the standalone installer can conflict with updates distributed through the NeoOffice patching mechanism. The version of Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 is not designed well to handle multiple versions of the same Spotlight indexing plugin in mulitple locations, or multiple plugins that claim to handle the same file type. This may change in the future.

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The NeoLight plugin can be downloaded as a single installer package:

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If you have downloaded NeoOffice 2.x, you already have the Spotlight indexing plugin.

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http://trinity.neooffice.org/downloads/neolight_installer.pkg.tgz

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* Latest Version : 1.1.6

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*40K in size

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* Last updated 6/21/07

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* Latest Version : 1.1

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** ''most recent update for Leopard support''

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* MD5 sum : 34339a63668f56caadb8dfde6f65223a

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* Last updated 10/2/05 12:29 PST

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** ''most recent update for OpenDocument support, x86 support''

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==Installing==

==Installing==

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NeoLight assumes the following UTI types correspond to the following file types:

NeoLight assumes the following UTI types correspond to the following file types:

The 1.1 plugin release will define these UTI mappings within the Info.plist of the importer plugin. This allows the importer to index OOo formatted documents even on machines that have neither NeoOffice/J nor OpenOffice.org installed!

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The 1.1 plugin release will define these UTI mappings within the Info.plist of the importer plugin.

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To install the NeoLight Importer Plugin, simply extract and double-click the '''neolight_installer.pkg.tgz''' file linked to above. After you click through the requisite license agreements, the installer will install the NeoLight plugin named '''neolight.mdimporter''' within the '''/Library/Spotlight''' directory. This will make the NeoLight importer available for all users on the machine.

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NeoLight is automatically installed with NeoOffice.

===Testing Your Installation===

===Testing Your Installation===

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To verify that installation was successful:

To verify that installation was successful:

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# Launch '''NeoOffice/J'''

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# Launch '''NeoOffice'''

# Create a new empty Writer document.

# Create a new empty Writer document.

# Under the '''File''' menu item, choose '''Properties.'''

# Under the '''File''' menu item, choose '''Properties.'''

# Add a '''Title''' for the document with a relatively unused nonsense word (e.g. "interzone")

# Add a '''Title''' for the document with a relatively unused nonsense word (e.g. "interzone")

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# Notice that the title from the '''Properties''' dialog appears in the document's titlebar.

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# Notice that the title from the '''Properties''' dialog appears in the dialog's titlebar.

# Save the document to a known location with a filename that does not contain your nonsense word.

# Save the document to a known location with a filename that does not contain your nonsense word.

# Start a new Spotlight search.

# Start a new Spotlight search.

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* textual display content of all cells of a Calc document for indexing

* textual display content of all cells of a Calc document for indexing

* content of bullets, titles, and other text areas for indexing from Impress and Draw documents.

* content of bullets, titles, and other text areas for indexing from Impress and Draw documents.

Once the NeoLight plugin is installed, it should be possible to search OOo formatted documents by these criteria within Spotlight enabled applications.

Once the NeoLight plugin is installed, it should be possible to search OOo formatted documents by these criteria within Spotlight enabled applications.

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Version 1.1 (10/2/05) defines UTI types for the OpenDocument o{d,g}* extensions now that the extensions and MIME types have been finalized, so Info.plist editing should no longer be required to start indexing OpenDocument formatted files.

Version 1.1 (10/2/05) defines UTI types for the OpenDocument o{d,g}* extensions now that the extensions and MIME types have been finalized, so Info.plist editing should no longer be required to start indexing OpenDocument formatted files.

NeoLight is not specific to NeoOffice and can index any OpenOffice.org 1.x formatted document. Starting with version 1.0.3, no special actions are required to index OpenOffice.org documents besides installing the neolight plugin. To force reindexing of OOo documents already existing on your computer, you may need to do a find with mdimport as noted above.

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NeoLight is not specific to NeoOffice and can index any OpenOffice.org 1.x formatted document. Starting with version 1.0.3, no special actions are required to index OpenOffice.org documents besides installing the Neolight plugin. To force reindexing of OOo documents already existing on your computer, you may need to do a find with <tt>mdimport</tt> as noted above.

==Known Issues==

==Known Issues==

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* The UTI types are required to be defined before files are manually indexed using mdimport -d3. Files that get indexed prior to the initial installation of the neolight plugin will get the wrong UTI type in the Spotlight metadata database. Although the type tree gets updated to reflect the proper mapping to the org.neooffice types, the raw type remains fixed to the dynamically generated dyn UTI type and the file cannot be indexed. Workaround is to copy the file to a new file and re-index again.

* The UTI types are required to be defined before files are manually indexed using mdimport -d3. Files that get indexed prior to the initial installation of the neolight plugin will get the wrong UTI type in the Spotlight metadata database. Although the type tree gets updated to reflect the proper mapping to the org.neooffice types, the raw type remains fixed to the dynamically generated dyn UTI type and the file cannot be indexed. Workaround is to copy the file to a new file and re-index again.

* Content is being extracted in Unicode16 encoding, where possible. I am unsure if OOo 1.x files can go to different encodings that may cause the parsers to fail.

* Content is being extracted in Unicode16 encoding, where possible. I am unsure if OOo 1.x files can go to different encodings that may cause the parsers to fail.

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* Having two copies of NeoLight on the same system is A Bad Thing™ (particularly if one of them is an older copy, e.g. the NeoLight in the NeoOffice 1.1 bundle). This is a limitation of Apple's Spotlight design.

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* Installing any other Spotlight indexing plugin that claims the same UTI types as NeoLight may result in an unknown plugin being used.

==Getting the Source Code==

==Getting the Source Code==

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* impress - Contains functions for SXI file parsing (and SXD)

* impress - Contains functions for SXI file parsing (and SXD)

* main - CFPlugin foundational code and dispatch of metadata extraction to appropriate handler based on UTI type

* main - CFPlugin foundational code and dispatch of metadata extraction to appropriate handler based on UTI type

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* base - Contains functions for ODB file parsing.

All of the functions are commented with [http://docpp.sourceforge.net/ Doc++]/JavaDoc style comments, so you should be able to run a documentation generator on the code to browse through it.

All of the functions are commented with [http://docpp.sourceforge.net/ Doc++]/JavaDoc style comments, so you should be able to run a documentation generator on the code to browse through it.

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==Issues and Feedback==

==Issues and Feedback==

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Please note any issues here or in the [http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=15 NeoLight Development forum] on http://trinity.neooffice.org

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Please note any issues in [http://bugzilla.neooffice.org/bug.php?op=add&project=2 Bugzilla] or in the [http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=15 NeoLight Development forum] on http://trinity.neooffice.org.

NeoLight is an abbreviation I've come up with for "NeoOffice Spotlight Importer". This importer allows Spotlight to index metadata and content within the files created by NeoOffice. Through Spotlight integration, searching across multiple NeoOffice documents can be done in a nice, Mac-like fashion.

NeoLight is released under the GNU General Public License. It is our opinion that GPL does not extend to the operating system as GPL contains exceptions for code utilizing standard operating system services.

The NeoLight plugin is included by default for all NeoOffice installers. NeoLight updates will be made available with the next NeoOffice patch following the release of a new version of NeoLight.

The NeoLight plugin is no longer available as a download separate from the NeoOffice application. Using the standalone installer can conflict with updates distributed through the NeoOffice patching mechanism. The version of Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 is not designed well to handle multiple versions of the same Spotlight indexing plugin in mulitple locations, or multiple plugins that claim to handle the same file type. This may change in the future.

If you have downloaded NeoOffice 2.x, you already have the Spotlight indexing plugin.

Throughout its system, Spotlight identifies files by UTI types. Because Mac OS X does not have built-in types for OpenOffice.org formatted files, they must be defined by an installed application to avoid having Spotlight assign them dynamically-generated UTI types (which cannot reliably be mapped to a Spotlight importer).

NeoLight assumes the following UTI types correspond to the following file types:

If you have the Tiger Developer's Tools installed, you can verify proper loading of the plugin from a Terminal after installation using the following command:

/usr/bin/mdimport -L

You should see /Library/Spotlight/neolight.mdimporter in the list if all has been installed well.

To verify that installation was successful:

Launch NeoOffice

Create a new empty Writer document.

Under the File menu item, choose Properties.

Add a Title for the document with a relatively unused nonsense word (e.g. "interzone")

Notice that the title from the Properties dialog appears in the dialog's titlebar.

Save the document to a known location with a filename that does not contain your nonsense word.

Start a new Spotlight search.

Type the nonsense word you used above.

If the NeoLight plugin is installed properly, the document you just saved should show up in the search results. If it doesn't, open a Terminal and type the followng:

/usr/bin/mdimport -d3 /path/to/test/doc.sxw

Check to make sure the document is of type "org.neooffice.writer". If it is, look in the keys for the "Title" key and you should see your nonsense word. If you do, then everything is installed correctly.

If when you type the above the doc is of type "dyn.a3f42morehexgarbageinherefoo", LaunchServices hasn't mapped the extension to the UTI type properly. Either the update to the Info.plist is misapplied or you may need to rebuild your LaunchServices database.

If you want to index several files or directories, you can use the "find"-command. This example let Spotlight index all *sxw-files in your $HOME-directory:

sudo find -s $HOME -name *sxw -exec /usr/bin/mdimport -d3 {} \;

If you'd like Spotlight to just re-index all of your NeoOffice documents automatically, just use the following command:

Starting with version 1.0.3 (5/7/05), the neolight importer is compatible with both documents generated by NeoOffice/J 0.8.4, NeoOffice/J 1.1, OpenOffice.org 1.x, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OpenDocument). While OpenDocument compatibility has not been extensively tested, documents that conform to the approved OpenDocument specification should be compatible.

Version 1.1 (10/2/05) defines UTI types for the OpenDocument o{d,g}* extensions now that the extensions and MIME types have been finalized, so Info.plist editing should no longer be required to start indexing OpenDocument formatted files.

NeoLight is not specific to NeoOffice and can index any OpenOffice.org 1.x formatted document. Starting with version 1.0.3, no special actions are required to index OpenOffice.org documents besides installing the Neolight plugin. To force reindexing of OOo documents already existing on your computer, you may need to do a find with mdimport as noted above.

The UTI types are required to be defined before files are manually indexed using mdimport -d3. Files that get indexed prior to the initial installation of the neolight plugin will get the wrong UTI type in the Spotlight metadata database. Although the type tree gets updated to reflect the proper mapping to the org.neooffice types, the raw type remains fixed to the dynamically generated dyn UTI type and the file cannot be indexed. Workaround is to copy the file to a new file and re-index again.

Content is being extracted in Unicode16 encoding, where possible. I am unsure if OOo 1.x files can go to different encodings that may cause the parsers to fail.

Having two copies of NeoLight on the same system is A Bad Thing™ (particularly if one of them is an older copy, e.g. the NeoLight in the NeoOffice 1.1 bundle). This is a limitation of Apple's Spotlight design.

Installing any other Spotlight indexing plugin that claims the same UTI types as NeoLight may result in an unknown plugin being used.

common - These contain utility code used across all the file types and common metadata extraction (all the OpenOffice.org file types have the same meta.xml format)

writer - Contains functions for SXW file parsing.

calc - Contains functions for SXC file parsing.

impress - Contains functions for SXI file parsing (and SXD)

main - CFPlugin foundational code and dispatch of metadata extraction to appropriate handler based on UTI type

base - Contains functions for ODB file parsing.

All of the functions are commented with Doc++/JavaDoc style comments, so you should be able to run a documentation generator on the code to browse through it.

While all of the files are technically Objective-C++, no Cocoa is used in the plugin. It is all CoreFoundation based and I'm essentially using the language as a "better C". Since plugins are supposed to be lightweight, it simply made more sense to re-use the CoreFoundation utilities then to make any grand scheme.